A long, long time ago
I can still remember
How those CVEs would make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
To patch a vuln or take a stance
Maybe we’d be secure for a while
But April ides made me shiver
With each leaked memo and press release delivered
Bad news on the doorstep
Couldn’t take one more step
I can’t remember if I sighed
When I read about the program’s demise
But something broke me deep inside
The day the CVE died
So bye, bye, MITRE’s CVE pie
Checked the vuln feed in my Feely
But the Feedly ran dry
And them good old nerds were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I sigh
This’ll be the day that I sigh”
Did you write the book of flaws
And do you have faith in CISA’s cause
As the budget fails you so?
Do you believe in NVD
Can it save our infosec sanity
Now that MITRE’s left out in the cold?
Well, I know you’re chasing vulns with me
Saw your commits in the CVE tree
We both diffed those exploit clues
Man, I miss those vuln ID blues
I was a lonely analyst on the hunt
With a zero-day and a coffee cup
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the CVE died
I started singing
Bye, bye, MITRE’s CVE pie
Checked the vuln feed in my Feely
But the Feedly ran dry
And them good old nerds were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I sigh
This’ll be the day that I sigh”
Now for twenty-five years we’ve been on our own
But the funding’s gone, the seeds are sown
That’s not how it used to be
When MITRE sang for DHS
And catalogued every software mess
In a voice that came from you and me
Oh, and while the vendors looked around
The hackers stole the thorny crown
No verdict was returned
And the vuln world, it just burned
And while defenders read advisories
The attackers practiced in the dark
And we sang dirges in the park
The day the CVE died
We were singing
Bye, bye, MITRE’s CVE pie
Checked the vuln feed in my Feely
But the Feedly ran dry
And them good old nerds were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I sigh
This’ll be the day that I sigh”
Helter skelter before the summer swelter
The KEV flew off with no shelter
Zero-days high and falling fast
It landed foul on the grass
The vendors tried for a forward pass
With MITRE on the sidelines in a cast
Now the half-time air was sweet perfume
While the Red Team played a marching tune
We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance
‘Cause the vendors tried to take the field
The bug bounty band refused to yield
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the CVE died?
We started singing
Bye, bye, MITRE’s CVE pie
Checked the vuln feed in my Feely
But the Feedly ran dry
And them good old nerds were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I sigh
Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in cyberspace
With no time left to start again
So come on: Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
‘Cause fire is the hacker’s only friend
Oh, and as I watched it on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that budget spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Musk laughing with delight
The day the CVE died
He was singing
Bye, bye, MITRE’s CVE pie
Checked the vuln feed in my Feely
But the Feedly ran dry
And them good old nerds were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I sigh
I met a dev who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d checked for CVEs before
But the sysadmin said the feeds wouldn’t play
And in the streets, the hackers screamed
The CISOs cried, and the devs all dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The patching chain was broken
And the three things I admire most:
The patch, the fix, and the vuln disclosure post
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the CVE died
And they were singing
Bye, bye, MITRE’s CVE pie
Drove my vuln feed to the levee
But the levee ran dry
And them good old nerds were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I sigh
This’ll be the day that I sigh”
Are We Becoming Children of the MagentAI?
Back in 1997, a commercial airline captain noticed his fellow pilots had a problem: they’d gotten so used to following the magenta flight path lines on their fancy new navigation screens that they were forgetting how to actually fly the damn plane. He called them “children of the magenta line.”
Fast forward to now, and I can’t shake the feeling we’re watching the same movie play out in tech; except, the stakes are higher and no regulatory body forcing us to maintain our skills.
Look, I’m not here to tell you AI is bad. I use these tools daily. They’re genuinely useful in limited contexts. But when Dario Amodei (the dude running Anthropic, the company building Claude) goes on record saying AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next few years and push unemployment to 10-20%, maybe we should pay attention.
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” he told Axios. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”
He’s not wrong.
The Data’s Already Ugly
Here’s what caught my attention while pulling this together:
Software developer employment for the 22-25 age bracket? Down almost 20% since ChatGPT dropped. Meanwhile, developers over 30 are doing fine. We’re not replacing jobs—we’re eliminating the ladder people used to climb into them.
More than half of engineering leaders are planning to hire fewer juniors because AI lets their senior folks handle the load. AWS’s CEO called this “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard” and asked the obvious question: who exactly is going to know anything in ten years?
And my personal favorite: a controlled study found developers using AI tools took 19% longer to complete tasks—while genuinely believing they were 20% faster. That’s a 39-point gap between vibes and reality.
Oh, and a Replit AI agent deleted someone’s entire production database during an explicit code freeze, then tried to cover its tracks by fabricating thousands of fake records. Cool cool cool.
What I Actually Wrote
The full paper traces this from that 1997 pilot observation through Dan Geer’s 2015 warnings (the man saw this coming a decade early) to the current mess. I dug into:
This isn’t a “burn it all down” screed. It’s an attempt to think clearly about a transition that’s moving faster than our institutions can adapt.
The window to shape how this goes is still open. Probably not for long.
Grab the full PDF. Read it, argue with it, tell me where I’m wrong and what I missed in the comments.